Business and governments have a strong need for access control, which is a way of controlling which people may have access to restricted areas, items, or data. Secure access control provides access only to authorized personnel and prevents access to unauthorized personnel. For example, a business may desire that only high ranking management employees have access to confidential data. As another example, governments may seek to control their boarders using access control techniques to prevent access to the country to certain people. In either situation, an access control technology solution greatly assists in securing important areas and assets.
Access control generally implements someone or something to identify individuals seeking access to the protected areas, items, or data. Many conventional methods of identification exist. For example, a person seeking access could provide identification documentation to a security guard, enter a personal identification number into a computer terminal, or carry a digital token, or some combination of these identification methods. Each of these conventional identification verification methods have strengths and weaknesses. Depending on a business or government's business requirements, these conventional identification verification methods may lack the security levels necessary to create a highly secure environment.
To enhance security, technology based identification methods have been introduced. Biometrics offer very high security and are becoming a common method of identification verification. Biometric systems analyze identifiable characteristics of a person such as fingerprints, irises, and faces to perform identification or identity verification because characteristics like irises, faces, and fingerprints are unique to each person. Biometrics systems can identify a person or verify an identity using captured images of the person's identifiable characteristics. For example, a biometric identification solution may capture an image of a person's face, irises, or fingerprints in order to identify a person requesting access to a restricted resource. Subsequently, the biometric identification solution compares the captured image with a template biometric image, which the biometric identification solution created when the person enrolled in the biometric identification solution. Using a matching algorithm and a confidence threshold, the biometric identification solution determines whether a match exists between the captured image and a template and whether to allow access to the restricted resource.
Many biometric systems connect cameras or scanners to perform identification or identity verification of a person interacting with the biometric system. If a non-visual biometric is to be captured, then a biometric system may implement another type of peripheral device, such as a microphone if voice data is to be collected. In either cases, many different vendors create many different peripheral devices that can be used as part of a biometric solution. These peripheral devices can be sophisticated, such as peripheral devices capable of forming a 3-D rendering of a human face, or simpler, such as a common web camera.
Depending on the scale of the biometric system, the number of supported peripheral devices may be quite high. For example, if a government wants all its citizens to enroll in an electronic passport program, which stores biometric data on a smart card within the electronic passport, many different peripheral devices may need to be supported and implemented because of budget restraints and the large scale of the program. In just about any situation, it is desirable to support multiple vendor peripheral devices.
For each peripheral device, a device framework is designed and coded so that the biometric system can communicate with the peripheral device. Creating a device framework takes a great deal of work by a software engineer, and the software engineer may write 100's or 1000's of lines of code in order to support a new peripheral device and implement all its supported functions. As the number of supported peripheral devices increases, the amount time spent by the software engineer drastically increases. Also, the device framework for one peripheral device may not run on the same platform as another peripheral device. Thus, an engineer or engineering team needs to be well-versed in many different technology platforms.
Thus, a system that provides for peripheral device integration without overly burdening software engineers is desired. Also desired is a biometric protocol that quickly and easily integrates many peripheral devices while remaining user-friendly.